The Future of PASS

Posted @ 2/6/2013 5:30 AM by Adam |
Files in PASS General

February 6, 2013 – PASS just wrapped up its first Board meeting of the year and, as the minutes* will show, we passionately discussed the future of PASS. We must continue to service and grow our existing community but also recognize the need to meet the changing demands of insight-driven organizations. Our challenges are similar to those your firm or customers are experiencing. PASS needs more data, better ways to analyze it, and a renewed focus on solving business questions instead of focusing directly on tools.

Chris Webb’s recent editorial touched on this need for change. I agree with Chris’ position that organizations are driving toward more and more analytic insight. This insight goes beyond system performance, beyond report speed, and even what kind of charts or graphs to use. Today’s companies must explore their data in new ways, use more of it to model better decisions, and do it faster and more nimbly than ever before. They don’t care how it happens so it’s up to us to figure it out. What an exciting opportunity for all of us to tackle this challenge together.

I feel blessed to work in an industry with so many strong players and vendor solutions that embrace the Microsoft Data Platform—giving us a strong lineage for the types of self-service solutions our companies and clients are looking for. The upcoming Business Analytics Conference focuses on these types of solutions. We’ve got sessions for the power analyst, BI practitioner, Excel guru, data scientist and anyone who is involved in solving these types of challenges for their executives. I know Chris said he is coming to the conference, and I’m looking forward to seeing him there. Those of us in the business intelligence field have long wished for this type of knowledge sharing to help bridge the gap between building these solutions and achieving viral adoption— with the goal of having our organizations use these analytic-based solutions to their fullest potential.

My challenge to you: explore the tools in this new area. We’ve got our Big Data and Business Analytics Virtual Chapters set up to start the transition and a top notch line of speakers for this inaugural event! I have carefully reviewed the program for the Business Analytics Conference and am very excited. It’s been a long time since we had more than a new cool feature to be excited about in the data platform space. These new tools, techniques and cross platform solutions are the kind of things a database person’s dreams are made of! I can’t wait to see you there. Stay up to date on the latest by following @sqlpass and @passbac.